Re: [Usability]Definition of "desktop" - was a Usability topic.

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Fri, Nov 22, 2002 at 05:22:10AM +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Havoc Pennington">
> 
> > Just a .02, isn't it a weird technical detail of Unix that "the desktop"
> > is a module separate from "the OS." Certainly Mac/Windows don't have this
> > distinction.
> 
> But it's one that GNOME as a project will just have to live with. :-)
>

GNOME is never shipped in isolation, it should be designed to drop in
as a part of the complete user experience.
 
> The distributors may not have to live with it, but we need to provide hooks
> at our level to allow that to happen. (One of the reasons why I refuse to
> believe Owen when he says that usermode shouldn't be put upstream.)
> 

The problem with usermode upstream is simply that it's not portable,
even between Linux flavors. However gdm for example supports all the
Red Hat consolehelper/usermode stuff out of the box when it's
present. There's nothing to keep the rest of GNOME from doing the
same. And there's nothing to keep Solaris or other Linux distributions
from adopting and using usermode.

Not sure this involves GNOME really, other than GNOME using usermode
if present; moving usermode into GNOME just doesn't make sense, tons
of non-GNOME stuff uses it.

Havoc